And to think people reckon the British Socialists have problems

Given that every person with a blog is doing the UK's results, and as regulars will know what I think of the UK's results, there's not much point in chewing over those. So, I am hopping across the channel to see what our French chums have been up to.

Consider this map of results by département:

And compare it with the 2007 national results:

While I am mixing moutons with chèvres, note how the Socialists have been stomped just about everywhere, and poor old Bayrou could not even take his own département and fared no better than fourth. Aubry lost in her backyard too.

The stand out oddity for me is the result in the Vendée (the pale blue blob at 9 o'clock) , where De Villiers came top. De Villiers, in UK terms, might be considered a Eurosceptic high Tory, and headed the Libertas list in France. The Vendee has long been seen as a bastion of high Tory politics, including such Monarchism as the French have, with this dating back centuries. As a point of comparison, it is not too far fetched to consider whether one would expect Oxford and its environs to have remained fiercely royalist etc ever since being on the losing side of the civil war. Anyway, he took a rounded third of the vote there, followed by Sarko's lot with 23%. That appears to be at least double the figure De Villiers secured in the surrounding départements.

The best that the Socialists appear to have done anywhere is about 25%, and they were pushed to third in a number of depts by the extreme left in the form of the Greens, including central Paris and the départements that are home to many of the other big cities. While the French have a tradition of voting with the heart (or, I hope, for laughs) for the nutty fringe in anything bar the Presidential second round, it is pretty alarming that supposedly urban sophisticates wish to turn their back on the 21st century and head off to some sort of eco année zéro.